Open Threads

This is amazing:

Two weeks after Doris Anderson disappeared while on a hunting trip with her husband, the 76-year-old lay next to a creek surrounded by thick brush, alone and with no food or supplies.

Rescue teams had been through the mountainous area but found no sign of her. Knowing that she was only lightly clothed in temperatures that had dipped into the 30s at night, they had scaled back the search nearly a week earlier.

But they hadn’t given up.

On Thursday, a day after a sheriff’s deputy asked Anderson’s husband once again how the couple had become separated in the woods, the deputy and others returned to an area they had checked before and found her, alive, alert and in surprisingly good condition.

“We just asked her if she was hurt and talked to her about her family,” Trooper Chris Hawkins said Friday as Anderson recovered in a hospital from dehydration and a hip injury.

Doris Anderson is one tough cookie. Period.

One Tough CookiePost + Comments (24)

I’m Back.

The view from Saturday:

Can’t say that I missed politics much.

Open ThreadPost + Comments (108)

Publius at ObWings recently brought up a point that most seem to miss.

[T]he problem with Warner isn’t that he puts politics first. The problem is that he puts politics first while pretending not to do so. Few can furrow their brow on the Sunday morning talk shows better than Warner. But when push comes to shove, Warner never really did anything different than people like Inhofe.

Indeed, never underestimate the value of principled “moderates” to the overall GOP effort. The kabuki generally runs like this: George Bush proposes some extravagant new executive power, say legal sanction to pull the legs off of kittens. The Democrats reasonably agree (mostly) that pulling legs off of kittens is wrong, but usually lack the party discipline and/or the overall votes to stop the president on their own. Worse, nothing terrifies Democrats more than the thought that somebody might call them soft on terrorism for denying the president the power to deal with the awful kitten leg threat. The thought of David Broder calling them partisan practically reduces Democratic leaders to tears.

Mirabile dictu!, some combination of John McCain, John Warner, Lindsay Graham and Arlen Specter will step up and announce grave, serious concerns about the president delimbing kittens, dangling the possibility of sustaining a kitten-leg filibuster. Hey, Harry Ried says, let’s let these guys take the lead! Take that, David Broder! A month later the very concerned Republicans announce a compromise that looks almost exactly like what the president proposed in the first place. Blue dogs vote GOP, of course, leaving Harry Reid looking like a twice-fooled chump. Kittens lose. It happened so often that I named a post category after it.

Then again, that kabuki only worked when Republicans held a modest majority in both houses. No doubt the GOP was as surprised as the rest of us to find the whole enterprise completely unnecessary.

The Understated Importance of Johns McCain And Warner To The Rightwing MovementPost + Comments (23)

I completely missed this:

It seems to me that the phrase, “the guy that we get out of the hood,” is an implied racial reference. It refers specifically to blacks, though one could say the officer meant to refer only to young black men from the ghetto who, in the officer’s view, are prone to commit crimes.

Either way, it’s still race-specific in a case that otherwise has no obvious racial dimension. To shame Craig into telling the truth, the officer could have used a different example, like, “I expect this from some punk we get off the street.” Or, “I expect this from some low-life, but not a Senator.” It’s also fairly clear from the context that the officer is not associating blacks with bathroom cruising, but with dishonesty and “disrespect” toward the police.

Why would Karsnia use a race-specific reference in this context? First, the officer may associate blacks in general, or at least those from “the hood,” with bad conduct. In the heat of the exchange, this particular example is the one that first comes to his mind because black men from poor neighborhoods are the kind of people he would most associate with dishonesty and disrespectful behavior.

Second, the officer may have expected that Craig would immediately understand the reference and be especially shamed by it as a law-abiding white person. “Not only were you engaged in this tawdry behavior but now you’re acting like a black thug who lies to a police officer about it,” he seems to be saying. I doubt the officer would have used the “hood” reference if he’d been talking to a suspect who was black. It simply wouldn’t have worked against a black suspect, whether that suspect was from “the hood” or not. It would have backfired even if used against, say, a wealthy black lawyer in a business suit. Further, in the presence of a black person the officer would have been sensitized to using a racial reference. It only works as a shaming technique if it’s one white person speaking to another, with no blacks around to object.

I can see how that could easily be interpreted as a racist comment, but when I heard it, I thought nothing of it. I remember my drill sergeants and NCO’s (white, black, hispanic, and other) in the army referring to “back in the hood” or “back on the block” (‘You might be able to get away with that back in the hood’ or ‘We do things differently here than back on the block’, etc.) almost interchangeably, and there was no racism in their statements when they made them, so I paid no attention to his remark when I heard it.

Interesting, though.

The Craig Conversation- Something I Paid No Attention ToPost + Comments (39)

For Mike Nifong:

Nifong was sentenced Friday to a single day in jail, having been held in criminal contempt of court for lying to a judge during his pursuit of rape charges against the three falsely accused lacrosse players.

Superior Court Judge W. Osmond Smith III could have sentenced Nifong, who had already been stripped of his law license and had resigned from office, to as many as 30 days in jail and given him a fine as high as $500. Instead, he opted for a largely symbolic punishment — the public humiliation of sending a prosecutor to jail — that he said would help protect the integrity of the justice system.

“If what I impose with regard to Mr. Nifong would make things better or different for what’s already happened, I don’t know what it would be or how I could do it,” Smith said.

It was the latest in a line of punishments for a broken man who once confidently trumpeted to anyone within earshot that a woman hired to perform as a stripper at a March 2006 lacrosse team party had been raped.

Should have gotten the whole month.

A Jail Sentence in the Duke Lacrosse CasePost + Comments (3)

Wondering if any of you tech guys out there have some advice regarding quicktime.

Is that the best software package to easily create videos/audio, and what sort of computer setup would be needed- including camera and audio recording implements of destruction.

Video EditingPost + Comments (18)

More animal friends that I’ve met during my time away from work and politics.

This first pic is for my ma who detests spiders. Conversely, I love spiders and anything else that eats mosquitoes. I have no idea what species this is but the bandy legs looked cool to me.

I think that I might have a better handle on this one:

Vacation Blogging Part DeuxPost + Comments (38)